skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Have you spent time around intentional communities?"

Yes and I know what you are talking about, but I was indeed using it more in a loose meaning, like friends moving intentionally close together and living in houses next to each other and sharing common ressources like a sauna and take turns in babysitting. Not necessarily sharing one kitchen and bathroom together. But for some this also works, for me only with certain people.

"or (historically) a religious cause"

And that is still a thing.
Personally my common cause would be building open source technology together.
If someone pays up front for a service to be delivered over a period, you have a liability, no matter whether on a cash or accrual basis.

The difference is that you can recognize the revenue on receipt of the cash, but at the same time, you also recognize the liability to deliver the service (based on COGS etc for the liability).

The liability reduces as you expense (and actually pay on a cash basis) the cost of supplying the service.

At least that's my non-accountant idea of how it works.

I may be completely wrong.
Providing decent living for 8B people requires only 30% of current resources use
There is a seller in China who sells similar products on the Xiaohongshu platform. Only sold for 50 RMB. https://www.xiaohongshu.com/user/profile/60c6ba3a00000000200...
True. Will do now.
> What happens when the network goes down?

When I was traveling in London in 2018 I was barely able to pay for the groceries I needed in order to eat that night because I was checking out just as the global VISA outage started happening.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa...

The machine took a long time to process my payment, but after a couple of attempts it managed to go through. As I left the store I noticed a long line forming for the self-checkout registers, and nobody else was able to get their payments to go through. There was apparently no option to fall back to cash at that store.

Whenever I travel now one of the bits of research I do now is to make sure I have a plan for getting basic necessities like food and shelter should an electronic payment system outage like that happen again.
Tell me you know nothing about machine learning without telling me you know nothing about machine learning
The non-optimistic reality seems to be that AI will be the next step in evolution, but not in human one. It's far more complex to create smart AI from human than to create smart AI.
Webb-Site Database
Taxi Drivers Offer a Clue to Lowering Alzheimer's Risk
are the grammatical and spelling errors on purpose?
> This [site] is my life and this is where I have any control. This is the only rebellion I am capable of.

Jeeze, talk about defeatist! What a narrow view of the world. Is this cowardice, or mere naivete?

Edit: I'll give credit where due—

> aimed not at better software, but at better return of investment. We could have had much better working computers.

True, yes, but we weren't—haven't been—able to pay for them.

And, remember, software is only a means to an end! And that end is value for the humans invested in it! You know, a return value. This is a higher priority than "better software," because with ROI I can get done any number of things that are impossible for computers to accomplish. I want my return in the form of a fungible medium of exchange, not some programmer's idea of a good time!

I say this as a programmer whose software has been REALLY GOOD and REALLY UNPOPULAR.

If people knew what computers were capable of, maybe they'd pay us to build them. I'm hoping AI will at least rekindle that optimism, even if LLMs are a largely a bill of goods.
Shoot, I meant to direct link. Might be too late to change it?
The usage of hyperbole and absolute statements in the post are distracting, and make it difficult to read through. It also seems that the author is trying to jam a LLM-sized peg into a classical programming-sized hole and has become angry that it didn't work cleanly, and so now believes its the LLM's problem.
Glad I dropped Bench a few months back for my own solution. They started out great, but over the past 18 months, I was always having to reconnect via Plaid and then be told way after the fact to manually upload bank statements because my data wasn't syncing. Even worse, I started having to manually categorize nearly all transactions despite there being existing identical transactions they could auto-categorize from. Finally just built an app that imports data from my bank and lets me bulk categorize/fuzzy search transactions.
Regarding China, Russia and India. They’ve all got a big problem with the literal enslavement of people from ethnic minority communities. I think that’s racism.

https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/
> Why commit such brazen sabotage with a spy ship?

Perhaps it wasn't brazen sabotage, but incompetent attempts to attach something to the lines?

Or conflicting agendas trickling down to the same ship, where the left-hand of "go cause some mayhem" didn't know what the right-hand of "collect signals intelligence" was already doing with that asset.
It sounds to me like you’re just describing the limitations of textual communication, which I agree is limited in all the ways you have written in this post except the last.

But, it’s entirely possible to have thoughtful, deep, honest discussions with individuals over a textual medium and to develop meaningful relationships in that way. I have done so. Often these relationships start in a more open public setting and become more meaningful in a private space, similarly to real life.
If you notice the GP research, they almost all focus on Symbolic Regression because the problem space is easier with commutativity and associativity. Generating programs is much harder because of state-space issues and Genetic Programming quickly falls into premature convergence. If you actually look at the breadth of research in this field, it is almost all efforts to combat premature convergence. As an algorithm, I don't think GP is all that great of an optimization technique. My PhD turned from GP research to developing an alternative called Prioritized Grammar Enumeration (PGE). This could be adapted to generate programs, but I suspect similar scaling and correctness issues from state-space complexity. PGE does offer more opportunity to create local generators that ensure some amount of correctness. Both algos still primarily benefit from noticing and ignoring bad solutions, which dominate the search space (the search space is sparse w.r.t. good solutions)

I agree with GP that you'll likely have to create cross language techniques to develop a system that has reasonable performance. I used a mix of Go & Python and used REST APIs to communicate between the processes. It was actually more performant overall by doing so, as certain subtasks had bad performance (small object allocation in Python was a bottleneck, Go lacks SymPy equivalent for mathematical simplification).
I believe there are indications that suggest the era of big LLMs will come to an end because they will hit a price and performance wall. There is a serious possibility that they will remain an NLP tool, and real thinking will be formalized as various types of software in different niches. Multi-agent systems will resemble the early web, with thousands or millions of variations and different types of expert agents, not a single "god-like" software capable of doing everything.

It’s natural for major players to try to create a "digital god"; this is their monopolistic path. If this becomes possible, they will need to be privatized, and LLMs turned into infrastructure services for all of humanity, or else we risk ending up in a dystopia. However, there is a serious chance they won’t achieve a "digital god" and will instead, unintentionally, create a world with decentralized intelligence.

It’s better to be optimistic—we have nothing to lose, even if it’s not realistic.
How quickly people turn blaise about the micracle that LLMs are. Just a few years ago, passing the Turing test seemed an unattainable goal now it is an irrelevance.

Yet the author thinks ‘ChatGPT, LLMs and all that crap’. Unbelievable.

I use LLMs everyday. It has not only boosted productivity, but most of all, it made workmore fun.
Thanks, I was surprised I couldn't find anything for `Volkswagen` nor `VW Group`.
"Hello? We have a cheese emergency."
> Software also used to be:

> much more open

I am not sure that is the case. It is quite rare for people to be developing using closed source programming languages today outside of banking and finance, but it wasn’t the case not that long ago, such as before .NET (2014) and Java (2007) were open sourced.
I don’t care about this particular edge case. The idea of being remote controlled by buerocrats is appalling to me.

I live in Europe. Regulations here make Teslas slam on the brakes when the road is curved by more than x degrees, and break off a lane change apruptly if they take longer than x seconds. The intentions behind these rules written by some buerocrat in Brussels surely were as good as those behind the cookie banner.

I’m glad I still get to override those rules with my pedals and steering wheel.
Yes, and ..?

The terms 'using more carbon-free power' and 'using more fossil power' are not exclusive.

Their CO2 emissions are increasing, and that's all that matters.
Their target audience is global. Plus, those talks are virtually like a curriculum vitae or portfolio for those speakers. They are only limiting themselves. I speak 5 languages & I would never use anything but English on internet, but that's just me, I prefer to be understood by 99% instead of 1% of my audience when I speak.
I intended to reply to you. Nope, my parents don't reside in a western country and they all have private businesses and we are relatively well-off.

But even those who are not well-off or business owners will do this.
Ask HN: Why LLM are believed to reach us to AGI?
I am not talking about intution or random cryptic tweets?. I am not an expert and seem to be ignorant of why LLMS are believed to reach us to AGI.

I know LLMS are quiet powerful but AGI is a seperate beast imo and apparently people are claiming on twitter( including experts) that we will reach AGI in 3 years (or less).

I am a layman and this seems like the world is going to change dramtically if that is true and I want to be prepared for the change.

However, I am skeptical of all the claims particularly that we are near AGI in 3 years.So I need to know why experts think AGI is near
Should have reviewed their content with chatgpt before posting. Maybe next time.
A more favorable explanation would be that it’s resistance to let go of how things have been those last decades.
The best way is to be a CEO or CTO of an organization and mandate its use.

(Though even that sometimes fails if the tool is so utterly useless or cumbersome)
Cheesed to meet you, may I offer you an egg in this trying time?
I usually excuse typos, but when the post is literally about:

> Software used to also be substantially better written

I think he ends up tanking his own argument before he even started. Heck, there's a typo in the headline (which I guess is good bait, since I now clicked on and responded in this discussion...)
They made a computer program that can follow instructions in plain english. That's been a goal of computer science since the 60s, and I wasn't sure I was going to see it in my lifetime. This is more incredible than people give credit.
ah yes ASM, the bytecode manipulator for java. Please look forward to JAVA, my upcoming tool for manipulating assembly code.
I guess it's long enough for poor maintenance to let salty water do its thing. AFAIK even cars sent across the Pacific show damage when they arrive and special care is put to coat them.
Saying things were “much more open” before GitHub is wild.
If you think that "compression" somehow means "non-intelligent", consider this:

The best compression of data that is theoretically achievable (see Kolmogorov complexity) is an algorithm that approximates process that produces the data. And which process produces texts on the internet? Activity of the human brain. (I described it a bit sloppily. We are dealing with probability distribution of the data, not the data itself. But the general idea still holds.)

Using chain-of-thought removes the constraint that the output of the resultant algorithm should use fixed amount of compute per token.
> I will keep this site althole-free, [...] This is my life and this is where I have any control. This is the only rebellion I am capable of.

I might agree with some of the author's sentiments, but based on this post alone, he makes the impression that computing is all his life. And now his life is going through a shift.

The problem here isn't LLMs.
It's a huge ecosystem which turns 30 in May. Yes, it accumulated lots stuff that was cool back then and isn't so cool now but overall is doing pretty well (COBOL was 36 when Java got public).
This is great. I can almost imagine a two timeline movie of this. Really hits home.
How do the results of such lenses compare to various compression algorhitms?
Chief-level people in newspapers.
Time was you used to have to pay for your compiler, and then manually crank it by hand. Kids these days have no idea.
They're _not_ driving on the freeway yet, outside of the limited test cases they outlined in the blog there, from this last January. Which is a bummer, because it adds _substantial_ travel time here in PHX, so, hopefully soon.
I agree with that. I don’t think passenger reports leading to taxi driver termination is a likely path.

But if a taxi driver has cognitive decline which imparts their ability to route plan effectively that would increase their stress, and preceived workload. What i think can be more likely is that those drivers would self-select out of the pool of taxi drivers. Subjectively they would say something like “it was too much trouble, there are better jobs elsewhere, etc” but what might be behind is the early symptomps of Alzheimer.
Since I run GrapheneOS on a Google-less Pixel phone, I can't install airline apps. So what I typically do is use my web browser to check in for my flight and get a PDF of my boarding pass, then I take a screenshot of the QR code.

The last time I did that the TSA scanner was able to read the QR code just fine, but the tablet app that the flight attendant was using at the gate couldn't read it for some reason. After about 10 seconds of fidgeting with the tablet they asked me what my name and seat number was. I told them, and after checking the list they let me through onto the plane. It looked like they tapped around in the app to override the QR code scan or something.

Fast-forward 20 minutes, and we don't push back from the gate when it's time to depart. After another 5 minutes of delay they got on the PA system and said something about the passenger count being off and that the airline's headquarters wouldn't authorize departure until they figured that out. At one point about half an hour into this a flight attendant walked over to my seat and leaned over to adjust the air flow thingy, which I thought was a super weird and random thing to do. In all it took nearly an hour of everyone sitting on the plane at the gate before they figured it out and authorized departure.

I actually have no idea where the breakdown was, because this happened at the gate when I flew earlier and it wasn't at all a problem. I presume the flight attendant scanning QR codes at the gate didn't hit the right buttons on their tablet that time. If we're going to rely on peoples' completely random personal devices to track authorization to travel, our systems need to be a lot better than this. Exceptions to whatever they think should be the "typical" flow should be straightforward and streamlined.

In the meantime since they've gotten rid of kiosks in my local airport I guess I'll be going to the front desk every time and ask for printed boarding passes.
My natural instinct when I encounter this kind of person is to lavish scorn on them, but I have to hold myself back from that. Partly because it's the mature thing to do, and partly because the coming years will be hard enough on them anyway.

As a sidenote, it amuses me that this author specifically calls out LLMs for being non-deterministic as a grave sin. Despite it being untrue (they've never heard of temperature, I guess), it's funny to me that it should be asserted as a prime directive for computing. Determinism is certainly a useful property where you can get it, but there's a whole lot of useful systems where you can't get it.
I would not be able to sustain more than a single academic course while working a 9-6 onsite IT job.

I was able to keep up with an upper division undergraduate Maths class on a 30 hour per week IT job. The course was very challenging for me but quite rewarding. Homework took at least ten hours per week.

In general, less energy during seasons of less sunlight is not at all unusual.
I personally found it interesting.
It's equally likely Intel realized it performed as well as Samsung/TSMC "7". Which is the whole issue, we'll never really know.
some extra knowldedge from my colleagues

- apparently china owns some cables in baltic sea, see the CITIC company
- one of their cables was also cut during recent events
The top scholars in a field will know which papers to read and which papers to cite. They'll talk with each other via email, chat groups, and at conferences. If the top scholars are in agreement, it's pretty hard for a journal to maintain its status. Outside of a discipline, laypeople can't tell. But if you're a top scholar inside the discipline, you'll be part of these conversations and you'll know. And thereby so will your discipline colleagues and PhD students who are not yet top scholars.
The chip has at least the same information that is printed in machine readable format on the photo page.

It has all the same fields in one or two lines with "<" field separators.

I've had the chip read, I've also seen the passport being scanned to read those lines.

A passport has two components, one is identification of the holder, the other is the travel (entry/exit stamps) history and potentially the conditions of entry (visas etc).
The USSR tried it already.

This is literal communism dressed up as science.

> Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification.

Literal. Communism.

The abstract embodies, I suspect unironically, literally every gripe, criticism, fatigue and disdain people feel for both the current scientific and academic establishment and the plethora of Malthusian narratives that permeate our public discourse today. If you don't understand how people can be "anti science" when it comes to climate change and the like, just read the remainder of the abstract after my quote. The last two words of it are "global south". These issues and these terms, once viewed as legitimate with genuine concern, are now viewed as nothing more than the dog whistles and manipulative strategies of ambitious tyrants to most people. Double down if you want to lose what little credibility you have left.
Follow the money: Much of the "predictions" and "everyone is sooo worried about" stuff is originated or amplified by people who will profit from that, particularly by attracting investors and grants.

Plus, it's simply a more-exciting future to imagine and discuss than "it'll be moderately useful in some specific applications but most our problems will still be around."
I use it for a floating window for watching videos & for sending SMS. It’s nice but I forget about it pretty often.
Wining 1000
You can win zmw
L1000
It wasn't clear to me from the article, but japan has had a lot of experience with reformation.
Absolutely. It really has a positive effect on your mood. When you have someone close to you, you always hang out and it makes it worth everything. Share struggles, share ideas, feedback. It is really a great feeling.
Samsung is going for 2nm in Taylor TX
They'll just replace them with AI, or more realistically, "Early Career Researchers" — those in academia with less than 20 years experience (after graduating their PhDs)
Claude 3.5 Sonnet Added to Visual Studio Code
Update: Think I have found a way to speed it up for Firefox (and everyone else too!). On holiday with the fam so might take a couple days before I push a fix. I'm optimistic though!
Use of Time in Distributed Databases-part 2: Use of logical clocks in databases
To show that it's a real human that wrote the article? Interesting idea.
Why not? Let me remind you the Russian capital ship of the Black Sea fleet during this war had most of it's self-defense systems inactive and half of them broken and was destroyed with 2 missiles. And the only Russian carrier - Kuznetsov - is famous for sailing everywhere with tug boats in escort because its engines are broken more often than working :)

Russian fleet's second name is "comically inept".
I’ve been thinking about writing a blog post but the gist of it is this realization. Developers who’s identities are wrapped up in the act of coding as it stands hate LLMs because it represents a drastic shift in the way programs are being written.

If being the smart dev writing clever code is the core of your identity and you have nothing else anchoring you you’re probably going to have a bad time over the next few years because the game is changing.
I took a 4-month break after 10.5 years working at 5 companies - from big enterprises to startups. I was okay financially, had a kid 9 months old at that time and living in a remote town.

That was the best decision I took. I got refreshed, learned many things about myself, and had a great time.

During that time period, I decided to build my own startup and then started thinking like a founder/problem solver than an employee. After 8-9 months, registered a company and building MVP on that, created a custom CMS and blog site.

Moneywise, I am constrained but very happy with my time and work I do. I used to dread Monday's but nowadays, I don't even put in alarm and is awake around 3:30 am and long work hours are tiring but not mentally exhausting as I don't answer to anyone and love the product I am building.
Not sure the author's main point - that computers become slower and less reliable over time - holds.

HN is snappy and rarely fails to function. I can't remember ever using a better group communication tool. The author's website is also snappy and worked perfectly to let them express their view and for me to read it.

A lot of software I use today is software I wrote myself and that works in the browser. It is reliable and snappy too. And I write more and more of it with the help of LLMs. Just yesterday, I wrote an image editing tool with a very special feature set and was amazed how much faster I was able to implement features in perfectly elegant code via this approach:

1: Give the existing code to an LLM and instruct it to add a feature.
2: Test the feature to make sure it works.
3: Go through the changes via git diff in one window and clean them up in another window in VIM.
4: Test again.
5: Commit.
6: Goto 1

This way, the development of this new tool was multiple times faster than if I had written it manually.

To me, the main questionmark about the future of computers is how browsers will develop. The one thing I am missing is that currently no mobile browser supports the File System Access API. On desktop, Chrome does. And that allows users to securely safe their data on their own device. So web software does not have to be like "All your data needs to be in the cloud". Chrome already works on bringing that to mobile. Then the current state of affairs on Desktop and Android will be perfect from my perspective. And all I hope for is that Safari follows. So that iOS users can comfortably use my software too.